Pebble smart watch pictures and hands-on

The Pebble smart watch, a bit of a Kickstarter legend, is now ready to ship. Demoed at CES in Las Vegas, the watch is incredibly feature packed, with full Android and iPhone connectivity.

For those yet to hear about Pebble, it is essentially an E-Paper watch which uses technologies such as Bluetooth and accelerometers to act as a wrist-mounted extension of your phone, as well as being a very cool customisable watch.

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The watch is also waterproofed to 5 atmospheres and is intended to be as tough as possible, allowing you to use the watch with apps such as RunKeeper, which will be coming about a month after launch.

Android 2.3.3 and iOS 5 or later are required to use the Pebble app. Once you have it installed, then the app will allow over the air installation of elements such as new watch faces and added functionality.

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It also works as part of the watch's second-screen capabilities. Say you receive a text message to your mobile phone, then it will pop up on the Pebble. The same also applies to email and even phone calls, which will make the watch vibrate and can be answered or declined straight from your wrist. Music can also be controlled via the watch, because it behaves a bit like a Bluetooth dock for iOS and Android.

The accelerometer inside the watch is used at present only to control the LED backlight, which is activated by a tap or a flick of the wrist. Pebble is promising software updates every two or three weeks which will add all the rest of the functionality promised on its Kickstarter website.

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Of all the clever tricks in the Pebble, our favourite has to be the interchangeability of of the watch faces. Things like "fuzzy time" which displays the time as text with phrases like "20 past five" or an analogue face based on an old Brawn watch, are very cool. The watch face SDK is also being sent out to developers, so they can make their own.

The Pebble is going to ship in red, white, black, orange and grey, as well as a special clear version for some lucky Kickstarter backers. The watch will be shipping from 23 January in the order that people backed the company.